Sunday, December 14, 2014

OK, maybe I'm going to have to become the world's least professional self-hosted blogger

After all that, I'm considering buying a domain and moving to self-hosted after all. Godaddy is having a sale (as near as I can tell, it's $12 for domain+hosting+wordpress for a year), and I guess I could use some time over the holidays to figure out how to set it up and move everything.

The problem is, while I am perfectly happy with my boring (and free!) blogspot blog, I've heard from four or five people that they have problems commenting here, and if four or five people have bothered to write/tweet me (oh yeah, I finally got with the program and got a twitter handle) that means there are probably more that have just uttered an unkind word and given up when the ()^&%)*%^&%*&^)( website ate their comments. And I hate being an ungracious host :( I'd like to increase the number of conversations I have, and I don't like that technical difficulties are challenging that.

So, I don't know, I'm going to sleep on it; the sale at Godaddy doesn't end five minutes from now. But I feel like I need to figure out some solution that doesn't result in it being really annoying (or even impossible) to comment here.

[Edited to add: it's tomorrow morning, I slept on it, and I decided to do it. How bad could $20 for the first year (including the domain masking Alicia pointed out I'd need) really be? So I picked up www.thesingledollar.com. Next step, uh, figuring out the tech migration. That'll probably take a while so I'll keep posting here for the next week or two until I have time to sort it out.]

4 comments:

  1. Re: that $12. Can you send me the link, because I just want to confirm your info. GoDaddy doesn't host, they only do domain registration (unless I am really out of the game). Alo, I am assuming you'd want your name (as owner of the domain) private, so you need to pay for that. Hosting costs $4/month at its cheapest, as far as I can tell. So either this is a SWEET deal, or it's just your domain, and not a self-hosted server.

    As for the whole blogger platform issues - I've finally worked the kinks out for commenting on your site, but it drove me batty in the beginning. I think there's improvements in that area (I started on Blogger too).

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  2. Never mind - I should have googled before! That's a sweet deal. Do it! And how did I not know GoDaddy hosts. But you'll still be at $20 or so for the year with privacy on Whois (which shows your address and everything!)

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  3. I know that i had trouble posting initially. And if you do go to wordpress you can just follow the instructions that MMM has on his blog. That is how I figured it out and i am certainly not the most tech savvy in the world. If i can do it you can do it! Wooohooo!

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  4. I told my husband that I got my domain for a dollar, do he jumped on it too! But he picked $1/month with hosting by accident. So he spent $12. Oh well. His included their website builder, but I'm not sure he had the option for hosting wordpress. It would be sweet if he did!

    No one has mentioned problems commenting on my Blogger site yet. But I'd prefer the simple name, email, url, comment that's standard for Wordpress sites. But, I'm not sure I'm ready to spend any real money on my site yet, plus I'm cheap, so I'll probably stay with Blogger for a while still.

    Good luck with your transition over the holidays. Excited to hear how it goes and to see your new look.

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